


Consider Me In Stillness

by toewsyourheart



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Laurent's Coping, M/M, POV Alternating, Post-Damen's Injury, Post-Kings Rising, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 04:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11456310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toewsyourheart/pseuds/toewsyourheart
Summary: Consciousness came and went.Mostly the latter. It was highly inconvenient.Laurent had mentioned there was a lot of blood.-The first hazy days that Damen couldn't recall well...





	Consider Me In Stillness

**Author's Note:**

> BACK AGAIN. 
> 
> Set in the hours after Damen is brought to his father's bedchamber, post-stabbing. Laurent is a mess. It's very shameless, I'm sorry.
> 
> ****POV SWITCHES AFTER EVERY '+' BEGINNING AND ENDING WITH DAMEN'S****
> 
> thanks to youaretrue/heartstrings, as always, for the extra eyes!

Consciousness came and went.

Mostly the latter. It was highly inconvenient.

Vision, when he possessed it, was blurry, fleeting splotches of haloed light and nothing more. His hearing was muffled, as if everyone speaking stood on the opposite side of a thick barricade between Damen and awakening.

The rest was filled with blackness, pain in his abdomen that oscillated between throbbing and searing, unrelenting dizziness.

Laurent had mentioned there was a lot of blood.

+

Laurent stood covered in the blood of Damianos of Akielos.

It would taste a lie to suggest he had never envisioned it, never longed to watch the life drain from him by his own hand, at a time and place not so far removed, in fact. Now, and forevermore, the concept was abhorrent, sickening. To lose him, Laurent carefully acknowledged, would be his ultimate undoing, a blow from which he would not recover.

The repetition was compartmentalized, yet ceaseless.

He must live. He must live. He must live.

There were matters more pressing than those of his heart, ones that deserved the full force of his focus. He saw to them methodically, though the thought remained constant and driving, a background noise to which he operated.

Clear the way for Paschal. He must live.

Secure Ios. He must live.

Ready for resistance. He must live.

He must live.

Damianos of Akielos must live.

+

Laurent’s voice pierced through silence like a knife, directive and sharp, much like the one his own brother gouged into his side an undetermined time ago. How much had passed, since his last spell of awareness? Minutes? Hours?

Kastor was dead. His father, dead, taken from the very bed in which he now lay.

Damen was too weak and out of sorts to move, as irritating as it was, listening instead, to the commotion around him, to the voice that stirred his mind from darkness.

“Akielos has lost one King to this bedchamber. I do not intend for it to become a second,” Laurent spat, coldly.

“Our physicians will see to his care,” another familiar voice—Nikandros’s—argued. “How can we trust—”

“Trust!” Laurent scoffed, a humorless laugh escaping him. “They will not touch him.” The words were spoken with a finality that rang through each syllable. “Kastor’s blade still drips with the blood of your King, and I can only assume each man here lie with him in treason until definitively proven otherwise. _My_ physician will see to him, and I will hear of nothing else.”

Laurent really was putting up such a fuss.

Damen could not locate his voice to ask, but he was certain both Nikandros and Paschal, wherever he was, would be in agreement.

+

“Paschal—” Laurent beseeched, pinching tightly at the bridge of his nose. He sat at Damen’s hip, with no plans whatsoever to leave him.

Hours passed. Guards came and went, receiving instruction. Servants delivered food and drink that remained untouched. Nikandros brought report from the North, reluctantly, his tail tucked between his legs as it was when he left out. If Laurent possessed the faculties to feel smugness, he would. He was right, unquestionably, about the physicians, and Nikandros knew it, though stubbornness prevented him from acknowledging it.

The hallmark characteristic of an Akielon.

As it was, Laurent was unbothered by Nikandros. The Akielon who held his concern did not stir beyond brief, mumbled nonsense and the subtle shift of eyes behind closed lids, and there was nothing else, at the moment, that could derail him from that fact, stark and shaking. Laurent dared touch them, delicately, to feel the activity. He placed his hand over Damen’s beating heart.

He lived, but he did not stir. It was maddening that there was nothing to be done but wait.

“—How long will this persist? I cannot bear it.”

“Your Highness,” Paschal replied from his dimly-lit corner of the room. He stifled a longsuffering sigh, and Laurent narrowly refrained from telling him exactly where he could shove his impatience. He had not asked _that_ many times. “The King lost a tremendous amount of blood. Consciousness evades him because he is too weak.”

“I'm well aware of the amount, Paschal,” Laurent said, glancing down at his crimson-stained chiton. “I wear it on me still.”

“I assure you, he rests comfortably. He will wake when he’s ready,” Paschal repeated, eyes softening with pity. Laurent was growing tired of it, his cheeks reddening. “You have my sincerest sympathies, My Prince.”

He didn't want them.

“Your pity for me will not make him ready faster,” Laurent murmured petulantly, gently brushing a strand of dark hair off his forehead. He longed to watch his eyes drift open, the single dimple mark his cheek in a warm smile. He could think of nothing he desired more. “Give it to Damianos.”

“You care for him,” Paschal remarked, and Laurent’s chest tightened with the overwhelming truth of it. At the present moment, it would be simpler if he did not. Thankfully, Laurent was given no choice in the matter, but if he were, he would choose him each time.

“Deeply.”

“Then they are the same,” Paschal said, then the moment stretched, Laurent’s mind in constant motion.

They were. To wish the best for him would be to, inherently, wish the best for Damianos, the entanglement irrevocable. The reality of it both exhilarated and scared him half to death.

Paschal suggested, “Perhaps you would benefit from a reprieve.”

“That—would not be useful,” Laurent said, to his core, opposed to the idea. What if he were to wake in his absence? He thought, instead, he could seek comfort in solitude, an opportunity to be alone with Damen and touch him with fewer inhibitions. “I cannot think away from him, but perhaps you might.”

+

“You keep—muttering things, and I think you've come back to me.”

Laurent was talking to him in a low voice, Damen realized, his mind clouded in haze. He wondered if he was dreaming, then Laurent continued to speak and all doubt was erased.

“It cannot be much longer now, can it? If you could consider it…”

Damen ached to the depths of himself. He could never have dreamt something like this, Laurent murmuring to him tenderly in the quiet, attempting to come to terms on the conditions of his awakening. It was rare that Laurent encountered an issue he could not combat with his mouth.

Laurent chuckled humorlessly at first, nervously, then went on with a calmness that made Damen feel settled as well.

“This reminds me of a game Auguste used to play with me when I was a boy.”

He said it as though discussing the weather, if it were suddenly something he was fondly amused by.

“Whenever I’d been promised we would do something fun together, he would pretend to oversleep. Predictably, I would barrel into his room, demanding he wake, and I—We had been working on using suggestions and requests rather than making demands. Auguste was always teaching me lessons, but I never quite mastered that one…”

The nostalgic way Laurent spoke was staggering, reminiscent of their reunion in Karthas, when he talked casually of Auguste’s memory in a manner in which they never had before. Damen could tell in the softness of his voice, the mention of his brother eased him.

“I feel foolish just—talking when I know you can't hear me, and I know you aren't pretending. You'd better not be, anyway,” Laurent added. Damen could immediately imagine the look that accompanied it, sly and teasing with an edge of menace, breathtaking. Then, “But that's what I’d ask him—if he could _consider_ waking to spend the day with me. He agreed it was more polite.”

To share in this with him, even in some strange limbo between consciousness and sleep, perhaps in dreaming, was precious. Damen glimpsed at the most vulnerable parts of Laurent, who willingly bared them. He would not take that for granted.

“So again, if you could be bothered, Damianos, to consider waking to spend a life with me, it would—” Laurent paused, drawing in a ragged breath. “We have a kingdom to rule—”

“ _Please_.”

+

“Laurent.”

The raspy sound tickled at his ear, prodded at his exhaustion. Damianos had toyed with him this way throughout the evening, muttering without fully waking. The first time Damen said his name in sleep, almost yearning, it clenched hard in Laurent’s chest. It affected him still, to know Damen’s subconscious featured him, but he would not be fooled again, until—

“If you might consider waking…”

He sat with a jolt, a muted gasp ripping through him, to meet the dark, bleary eyes of his lover, truly awakened.

 _“Damen._ ”

Laurent could not recall another time in which he felt such overwhelming relief, a tingling warmth that spread from his middle and settled throughout his limbs. It took his breath, and he felt simultaneously heavy, suddenly, in the most appealing way, as if those eyes alone tethered him here, made him whole.

“I fell asleep, I’m—”

“You’re exhausted,” Damen admonished, in no position to do so. For hours he slept, and for hours Laurent waited. What else would Damen have had him do? Mill about Ios, directionless? His mind, too frantic for long periods of rest, would not have left this bedchamber, even if his body was elsewhere.

“You're alive and awake,” Laurent countered. It was all that mattered. He would endure countless sleepless nights for it.

“It would appear so,” Damen muttered with a lilt of confusion. His voice cracked in a way that splintered in Laurent’s chest. Damen was always so strong, powerful and excessively proud. It surely ailed him, in more ways than one, to be down so severely. Damen shifted in bed, testing the limits of his body, and winced. Laurent saw the pain reflected in his eyes and felt it in kind.

“Be still,” Laurent whispered, and much to his surprise, Damen listened.

“Did you worry?” Damen asked, a smirk playing at his full lips, dry from his heavy breathing in sleep. He seemed himself, ever the shameless glutton for affection. Laurent could admit he was in no real position to pass judgment, as he was just as affected by Damen’s presence, his touch, gentler than Laurent ever thought to receive from anyone.

“What do you think?” Laurent replied with fondness.

“I think you are too far from me,” Damen said, eyeing the distance between them with a pout. Laurent hesitated, remembering the wince.

“I do not wish to hurt you fur—”

“Laurent, I am fine,” Damen insisted, refusing to acknowledge the extent of his injury or the truth of the matter: He was too quick, too easy to trust, even those who did not deserve it, and it nearly got him killed. Hard-headed Akielon. He could’ve—“Come here."

Laurent would not make him ask again, his resistance more painful to the both of them than his surrender could ever be. He fit himself along Damen’s side that had not recently been stabbed, and when Damen closed his arms around him, Laurent shuddered, then relaxed, unable to stop himself from pressing his lips to Damen’s neck, his broad, muscled chest.

“You did worry,” Damen remarked, and Laurent huffed a laugh at his satisfaction. Damen’s lips soothed him as they brushed against his forehead in return.

“Of course I did,” Laurent confessed, “Endlessly. Does it really please you so much to hear it?”

“Yes,” Damen said instantly, then, once realization hit, “No, I—It would take more than a flesh wound to keep me from you, Laurent.”

“Flesh wound,” Laurent scoffed, rolling his eyes. “You’re impossible, but still—Yes, I worried. The man who usually calms me was… unavailable.”

“I am here now,” Damen said, warmly. He squeezed, his grip noticeably lighter than usual. Laurent dispelled further fretting. He would recover fully. He would.

“And I am calm.”

“Kiss me,” Damen requested, and Laurent gladly lifted his head to do so. Before leaning in, his eyes searched Damen’s face, cataloguing, savoring the light in his eyes, despite his clear exhaustion.

Damianos lived, and they would have their life together.

+

The first press of lips was gentle, coaxing.

Damen breathed him in, pleased when Laurent opened to the kiss they both longed for, though he could still sense Laurent holding himself back, out of fear of hurting him. He slipped his fingers into Laurent’s hair, kneading at his scalp in a silent plea for him to relax, and he did, slightly.

“Laurent,” Damen whispered against his mouth, “I’m not going to shatter. It’s okay.”

“You might,” Laurent said, his hands mapping Damen’s face and neck. “And it's not. You could've—”

“But I did not,” Damen stopped him. To have him, to feel his touch, was healing in itself. “I am here, and I am yours.”

“Mine,” Laurent reiterated. He kissed as if he never wished to stop, languid and passionate. Damen was happy to oblige him until something else occurred to him—

“How old were you?”

Laurent looked him, confused, and none too thrilled with their pause, much to Damen’s satisfaction. “Hmm?”

“In your story with Auguste, about your lessons.”

Laurent’s cheeks flushed hard, crimson and gorgeous. Damen brushed a thumb over it, encouraging.

“Five or so,” he muttered, needlessly bashful. “I didn’t know you could hear me.”

“I love to hear you,” Damen said. He wished to know Laurent’s every memory, pleasant or not, whatever he was willing to share. “Though, honestly, Laurent, I did think I was dreaming.”

“Sometimes,” Laurent whispered, blue eyes softened at their edges, “I think I am, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading and commenting, if that's your thing! 
> 
> come find me @[watchingtheroad](https://watchingtheroad.tumblr.com/)!


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